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  2. Jun 2024
    1. What enabled these high aspirations in the 1940s?

      also, what impact did these programs in the late 40s and early 50s have on subsequent events in the 60s and 70s as these cohorts continued to age?

    2. In Chicago, one catalyst for that growth—as a kind of public sym-bol and tacit approval from the business community—was “the FatMan’s Class,” which had begun meeting in 1942–1943 at Chicago’sUniversity Club. The moniker derived, according to some, from thegroup’s “affluence rather than the girth of its members.” Membersof this class included Chicago notables such as Harold and CharlesSwift, Marshall Field, Jr., Walter Paepcke, Hermon Dunlap Smith,William Benton, Hughston McBain (president of Marshall Field andCompany), and Laird Bell. This group caught the “fancy” of thepopulace, causing the University of Chicago’s University College topartner with the Chicago Public Library in 1944 to set up great bookscourses around the city.43
    3. An anonymous review in The Atlantic touched on the samesnobbish fear addressed by Barzun:Mr. Adler’s notion that “almost all of the great books in every fieldare within the grasp of all normally intelligent men” seems to usto need a deal of sifting. We do not know what he means by “nor-mally intelligent,” but if he means the average run of intelligencein our population, or in the student body of our schools and col-leges, we believe he is deplorably wrong. So also . . . the book’s sub-title, “The Art of Getting a Liberal Education,” savors strongly ofquackery. 39

      Compare this with the ideas of intelligence and eugenics of the time as well as that of class in Isenberg's White Trash.

      Presumably this anonymous author would have been seeing things from a more dominant eugenics viewpoint at this time period of 1940.

      See also: The Eugenics War (American Experience) https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/eugenics-crusade/

    4. Adler first came into contact with the great books idea whenhe took John Erskine’s General Honors course at Columbia Universityin 1920.
    5. It is Woodberry who bringsus to Columbia University and John Erskine.27
    6. Those larger goals highlighted edu-cation for good citizenship; to them great books were more of anantidote than a contributor to that bland, conformist mass culturefeared by mid-century critics (left and liberal and conservative) anddescribed by cultural historians.

      How, if at all, did the great books idea contribute to the idea of Manufacturing Consent for the 20th century?

    7. To understand elitism in relation to the great books idea, one mustconsider the meaning and existence of cultural hierarchies in litera-ture.
    8. cultural democratization as a sometimes contentious process.

      some of the cultural democratization at that time presumed free time as well as conscious choice to make the effort... what about those who have patience for neither?

      what about the economic choices to participate or not?

    9. Teaching necessarilyinvolves some level of hierarchy and paternalism; teachers pass onknowledge and skills to another group lacking both.

      compare the dominance forms of education to to guides by the side

      ideas of John Taylor Gatto and unschooling...

      also indigenous teaching methods which also pass down culture as part of an overall "package"

    10. Adler’s communityof discourse is a crucial part of this story about the great books idea
    11. David Hollinger’s notion of“communities of discourse.” First forwarded at the 1977 WingspreadConference, he emphasized this mechanism as a way to wrest thefocus from singular individuals (great men) identified as intellectu-als and situate them among specific social and cultural contexts
    12. Jacques Barzun

      Jacques Barzun wrote a review of of the Great Books when they came out in 1952.

      Barzun, Jacques. “The Great Books.” The Atlantic, December 1952. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1952/12/the-great-books/642341/.

      See notes at: https://hypothes.is/a/8o-z3DHLEe6_PMtDOvwCmg

    13. still building the Culture Wars politicalteleology.

      did the tension inherent in the cultural evolution of the great books idea versus vocational and other forms of education set up the culture wars of the late 1900s/early 2000s?

    1. The foregoing examples illustrate various forms topics take according to thedifferent kinds of subjects they propose for discussion. Some deal with the natureof a thing or its definition, some with its qualities or attributes, some with itscauses, and some with its kinds; some deal with distinctions or differences, andsome with comparisons or contrasts; some propose a general theory for considera-tion, some present a problem, and some state an Issue. Some— such as the lastthree above —are difficult to characterize by any formula.

      The complexity of the topic is determined by the content of the discussion the topic is about.

    2. It is easier to say what a topic is not, than what it is or should be. If it mustalways be a less determinate expression than a sentence, and if it must usually be amore complex expression than a single word or pair of words (which are theverbal expression of terms, such as the great ideas), it would seem to follow thatthe proper expression of a topic is a phrase— often, perhaps, a fairly elaboratephrase involving a number of terms and signifying a number of possible relationsbetween them. This general description of the grammatical form of a topic docsnot, however, convey an adequate notion of the extraordinary variety of possi-ble phrasings.

      To me, it seems that Adler et al., are arguing that a topic should be stated as a phrase with varying degrees of complexity, determined by ?

    3. For example, “The ideal of the educated man’"(Education la) is a simple topic; “The right to property: the ownership of themeans of production” (Labor 7b) is a complex topic; and “The use and criticismof the intellectual tradition: the sifting of truth from erroi; the reaction againstthe authority of the past” (Progress 6c) is a more complex topic.

      Some examples of topics that are formulated and used in the original syntopicon.

    4. The topics are the basic units of the Syntopicon. They perform a doublefunction. The Outline of Topics in each chapter is the analysis of a great idea,setting forth its various meanings, its themes and problems; and the individualtopics serve as the immediate headings under w^hich are assembled the referencesto the discussion of each particular subject in the great books. The topics are themajor subdivisions of the discussion in the sphere of each of the great ideas, as theideas are the main divisions of the whole discussion in the great books. As eachidea represents a general field of discourse— a domain of learning and inquiry—covering a variety of related themes and problems, so, under each idea, the varioustopics represent the themes and problems which are the particular subjects ofdiscussion in that field.

      It seems as though an idea is very broad and a "sub-topic" is more granular, though also determined based on the overall content and related to the primary idea.

    5. The two mfasi^rfs of intrinsic greatness — scope and significance

      It seems that most of the ideas were chosen based on scope and significance.

    6. The reason which operated against such multiplication of chapters was(as already stated) the desire to avoid excessive duplication among topics andreferences.

      Adler et al. operated from a state of efficiency in the sense that they did not want the book to become too long (even though, or maybe because of, the fact that the end result became already two volumes each more than a thousand pages)

    7. Both the great books and the great ideas were chosen to represent the unity andcontinuity of the tradition of western thought. The great l^ks are those whichdeal imaginatively or intellectually with the ideas which arc fundamental through-out this whole tradition. Any important work -ancient, mediaeval, or modern-will necessarily be concerned with these ideas in some uay. What distinguishes thegreat books is the originality, the profundity, and the scope of their treatment ofthese ideas. Other books, important in some special field of learning, may havethese qualities with respect to one idea or even to several related ideas, but thegreat books possess them for a considerable range of ideas, covering a variety ofsubject matters or disciplines; and among the great books the greatest arc thosewith the greatest range of imaginative or intellectual content.

      Adler explains the distinctive factor determining which authors and works were included in the list of the Great Books of the Western World.

      Basically, they were works that were influential, written excellently, and had applicability to a considerable amount of ideas processed by the whole.

    8. The great majority of terms eliminated were those which did not appear to ,receive extensive or elaborate treatment in the great books. They were terms thatdid not seem to have a lively career —a continuous and complex developmentthroughout the three-thousand-year tradition of the great books.The editors usedthe actual content of the great books as the test whereby to separate a small set oftruly great ideas from a much larger number of important concepts or notions.The reader can apply this test himself by comparing the 1800 concepts listed inthe Inventory of Terms, with the 102 ideas that are treated as the principalterms in the Syntopicon.

      The ideas were chosen on the basis of coverage within the Great Works.

  3. May 2024
    1. The “great books idea” becomes, then, a singular theoretical tool fordealing with change over time.
    2. The phrase “great books idea” arose to capture the evident diversityin thinking about the topic—the who, what, where, when, and howassociated with the notion of a great book and great books. The word“idea” allows for the abstraction from material circumstances: lists,institutions, book production, particular debates, people, et cetera.
    3. Lacy, Tim. The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. https://amzn.to/3R2rCox.

    1. "The great books are the inexhaustible books. The books that can sustain a lifetime of reading."

    2. "The great books are the books that never have to be written again. They are so good no-one can try to write them again."

    3. "The great books are the books that everyone wants to have read but no-one wants to read."

    4. What did not stand out to me before while reading the book, but does now when watching this, is the fact that the greatest books are subjective to each individual... Meaning my list might not be the same for others.

    5. Very fascinating thought experiment. Out of the 140+ books I have read so far only a few, less than a handful, would fit the list of "growth" books; the greatest, that I would take to the deserted island for 10 years...

      1. The Bible
      2. Antonin Sertillanges' The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Method, Conditions
      3. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations

      No other book, to my mind, that I have read so far would cut it to my list.

  4. Apr 2024
    1. Inthe case of good books, the point is notto see how many of them you can getthrough, but rather how many can getthrough you—how many you can makeyour own

      This is not only a nice quote by itself, but seems to be saying something deeper to me about productivity.

      There's a difference in productivity for it's own sake, but being both productive in the send of time spent efficiently and productive in the sense of producing something of greater value with your time than you might have spent doing something else which was less valuable, but which might still have been time well spent.

    2. It's like re-suming an interrupted conversationwith the advantage of being able topick up where you left off.And that is exactly what readinga book should be: a conversation be-tween you and the author.
    1. Worth, Robert F. “Clash of the Patriarchs.” The Atlantic, April 10, 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/russia-ukraine-orthodox-christian-church-bartholomew-kirill/677837/.

      A fantastic overview of the history, recent changes and a potential schism in the Orthodox Church with respect to the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

    1. Great Books tend to arise in the presence of great audiences. by [[Naomi Kanakia]]

      Kanakia looks at what may have made 19th C. Russian literature great. This has potential pieces to say about how other cultures had higher than usual rates of creativity in art, literature, etc.

      What commonalities did these sorts of societies have? Were they all similar or were there broad ranges of multiple factors which genetically created these sorts of great outputs?

      Could it have been just statistical anomaly?

  5. Mar 2024
    1. a tool converts what we can do into what we want to do. A great tool is designed to fit both sides.

      Both sides of a tool

      References

      Victor, B. (2011). A brief rant on the future of interaction design. Tomado de https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

    1. Scholars, in the past and the present, have agreed that the most populous groups among human beings are the Arabs and the Turks. Surely you know how the sovereignty of the Arabs was established when they became united in their religion in following their prophet [Muhammad]. As for the Turks, their rivalry with the kings of Persia and the seizure of Khurasan from the latter by their king, Afrāsiyāb, is evidence of their royal origin. None from among the kings of the earth—not Khusraw, nor Caesar nor Alexander nor Nebuchadnezzar—is comparable to them with regard to the extent of their group solidarity (‘asabiyya).

      Arabs and Turks as having most asabiyyah (even more than the likes of Caesar and Alexander)

    1. Let us gratefully acknowledge the wisdom of the traditions that came before us, and are re-emerging today, bearing strong witness to the interconnectedness of all life.  Let us also borrow the perspective of future generations and, in that larger context of time, look at how this Great Turning is gaining momentum, accelerated by the choices of countless individuals as they band together in networks and campaigns all over the world.  We can see this happening simultaneously in three areas or dimensions that are mutually reinforcing: actions to resist and slow down the damage to Earth and all its beings; analysis and transformation of the socio-economic foundations of our common life; and a perceptual, cognitive, and moral shift to biocentric values and world views that affirm our human responsibility to life in all its richness and diversity and to future generations. Many people are engaged in all three dimensions of this Great Turning, all of which are necessary for the creation of a life-sustaining and just society.
    2. It involves the emergence of new and creative human responses, as well as a reawakening of sustainable indigenous traditions, that propel the transition from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life Sustaining Society. Attitudes shift from exploitation to respect, from extraction to regeneration, from competition to cooperation. More and more of us come to see how we are interwoven together as peoples, and that solidarity with one another is a way through these crises.  So we join together to act for the sake of life on Earth.
    1. Theindexer will want a feel, before they begin, for the concepts that willneed to be flagged, or taxonomized with subheadings. They mightskim the book – reading it in full but at a canter – before tackling itproperly with the software open. Or they may spend a while, as apreliminary, with the book’s introduction, paying attention to itschapter outline – if it has one – to gain a sense of what to look outfor. Often, having reached the end of the book, the indexer will returnto the first few chapters, going over them again now that they havegained a conceptual mapping of the work as a whole.

      It's no wonder that Mortimer J. Adler was able to write such a deep analysis of reading in How to Read a Book after having spent so much time indexing the ideas behind The Great Books of the Western World.

      Indexing requires a solid inspectional read at minimum, but will often go deeper into contexts which require at least some analytical reading. To produce the Syntopicon, one must go even further into analytical reading to provide the proper indexing of ideas so that they may be sub-categorized and used for deeper analysis for things such as comparison and contrast of those ideas.

  6. Feb 2024
    1. Chancellor Edward N. Brandt, Jr., wearing ared T-shirt that said “The Great Discard,” chose a drawer of thecatalog and pulled it from the cabinet. With the help of a beamingCyril Feng, who was then the director of the library, he drew theretaining rod from the chosen drawer and let its several hundredcards ceremonially spill into a trash can decorated with coloredpaper.

      The intellectual historian in me: 😱

  7. Jan 2024
    1. the dzogchen contemplative system brings about extraordinary results that merit further research

      for - definition - Dzogchen - Great Perfection

      • definition - Dzogchen - The Great Perfection
      • Dzogchen is one of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism
        • The Great Perfection claims that everything is pure from the beginning
        • every moment is an emanation of a temporal origin
    1. 15:00 könnte der generalstreik am 8.1.2024 eine wende einleiten?<br /> hahahahhahahaha, nein.<br /> du glaubst ernsthaft, das system rechnet nicht mit "widerstand"?<br /> die haben alle variationen durch-simuliert, und haben für jedes problem eine lösung.<br /> der "plan Z" sind atombomben, weil das erste gebot (depopulation) ist absolut.<br /> vorher werden die noch die migrantifa bewaffnen und auf euch hetzen...<br /> und vorräte haben die sowieso für jahre, also die brauchen keine bauern / züge / LKW.<br /> also unterschicht und mittelschicht werden "bluten", egal wie dus drehst.<br /> das grundproblem ist die globale übervölkerung, "flatten the curve" heisst: die übervölkerung muss weg. erst dann gibt es ein "back to normal", eine "wende".

  8. Dec 2023
    1. Adler & Hutchinson's Great Books of the Western World was an encyclopedia-based attempt to focus society on a shared history as their common ground. H. G. Wells in his World Encyclopedia thesis attempts to forge a new "moving" common ground based on newly evolving knowledge based on distilling truth out of science. Shared history is obviously much easier to dispense and spread about compared to constantly keeping a growing population up to date with the forefront of science.

      How could one carefully compose and juxtapose the two to have a stronger combined effect?

      How could one distribute the effects evenly?

      What does the statistical mechanics for knowledge management look like at the level of societies and nations?

      link to https://hypothes.is/a/abTT1KPDEe6nqxPx4fXggw

    2. very carefully assem-bled with the approval of outstandingauthorities in each subject, carefully col-lated and edited, and critically presented.It would be not a miscellany but a con-centration, a clarification and a synthesis.

      Compare this with Hutchins and Adler's solution undertaken just a few years following this beginning in the early 1940s and finally published in 1952: The Great Books of the Western World.

      These books speak toward the idea of living well and understanding mankind, but don't have the same deeply edited and critical synthesis viewpoint.

    1. For citizens,neighbourhoods are the place to live. This is the level at which they get to know each other, build re-lationships and take action to achieve political and socio-ecological change 23
  9. Nov 2023
      • for: three great separations, alienation, financial capital vs social capital, the great simplification, linked in post - social capital
    1. Why do we feel so dissatisfied with the Western way? I think it’s because we have valued financial capital over social capital.
      • for: The Great Simplifcation, Nate Hagen, The Great Complexification, The Great Alienation, three great separations

      • comment

        • Last night, I had a thought about Nate Hagen's "The Great Simplification" project. Seeing Annilina's post this morning made me think of a recent film I annotated on the isolated Jarawa people living on a once desolate island off the coast of India
        • Watching the events of modern Indians exploited the Jarawa is like watching colonialism unfold in realtime.
        • The Jarawa people interviewed said how they are happy with the life they have lived before modernity discovered them.
        • Progress, especially the Western flavored one beginning with Colonialism, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution has set a trajectory for what we might call "The Great Complexification".
          • Remember when watches and clocks were all mechanical spring and windup? Now billions of them depend on batteries. Do we really need to modernize everything? It simply creates more waste and greater demands on nature for natural resources. Do we really need exponentially increase stuff with an Internet of Things?
        • Western influenced progress has led us into multiple progress traps, which now make up the many threads of the current polycrisis.
        • Along with the Great Complexification, we also have the Great Alienation. John Ikard writes of the "Three Great Separations":
        • These created successively more alienation. As progress marched towards modernity, we created more and more technology that broke apart community and making us dependent on transportation and communication technology to maintain it or some proxy of it. Today, we live in cities teeming with millions, yet there is widespread alienation in the mere act of walking or driving down a crowded street.
        • It is the irony of modernity that it packs so many people into small spaces, and yet we are all estranged to each other.
    1. Lovely. I guess what I'm trying to define is some methodology for practicing. Many times I simply resort to my exhaustive method, which has worked for me in the past simply due to brute force.Thank you for taking the time to respond and for what look like some very interesting references.

      reply to u/ethanzanemiller at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/185xmuh/comment/kb778dy/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      Some of your methodology will certainly depend on what questions you're asking, how well you know your area already, and where you'd like to go. If you're taking notes as part of learning a new area, they'll be different and you'll treat them differently than notes you're collecting on ideas you're actively building on or intriguing facts you're slowly accumulating. Often you'll have specific questions in mind and you'll do a literature review to see what's happing around that area and then read and take notes as a means of moving yourself closer to answering your particular questions.

      Take for example, the frequently asked questions (both here in this forum and by note takers across history): how big is an idea? what is an atomic note? or even something related to the question of how small can a fact be? If this is a topic you're interested in addressing, you'll make note of it as you encounter it in various settings and see that various authors use different words to describe these ideas. Over time, you'll be able to tag them with various phrases and terminologies like "atomic notes", "one idea per card", "note size", or "note lengths". I didn't originally set out to answer these questions specifically, but my interest in the related topics across intellectual history allowed such a question to emerge from my work and my notes.

      Once you've got a reasonable collection, you can then begin analyzing what various authors say about the topic. Bring them all to "terms" to ensure that they're talking about the same things and then consider what arguments they're making about the topic and write up your own ideas about what is happening to answer those questions you had. Perhaps a new thesis emerges about the idea? Some have called this process having a conversation with the texts and their authors or as Robert Hutchins called it participating in "The Great Conversation".

      Almost anyone in the forum here could expound on what an "atomic note" is for a few minutes, but they're likely to barely scratch the surface beyond their own definition. Based on the notes linked above, I've probably got enough of a collection on the idea of the length of a note that I can explore it better than any other ten people here could. My notes would allow me a lot of leverage and power to create some significant subtlety and nuance on this topic. (And it helps that they're all shared publicly so you can see what I mean a bit more clearly; most peoples' notes are private/hidden, so seeing examples are scant and difficult at best.)

      Some of the overall process of having and maintaining a zettelkasten for creating material is hard to physically "see". This is some of the benefit of Victor Margolin's video example of how he wrote his book on the history of design. He includes just enough that one can picture what's happening despite his not showing the deep specifics. I wrote a short piece about how I used my notes about delving into S.D. Goitein's work to write a short article a while back and looking at the article, the footnotes, and links to my original notes may be illustrative for some: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/a-note-about-my-article-on-goitein-with-respect-to-zettelkasten-output-processes/. The exercise is a tedious one (though not as tedious as it was to create and hyperlink everything), but spend some time to click on each link to see the original notes and compare them with the final text. Some of the additional benefit of reading it all is that Goitein also had a zettelkasten which he used in his research and in leaving copies of it behind other researchers still actively use his translations and notes to continue on the conversation he started about the contents of the Cairo Geniza. Seeing some of his example, comparing his own notes/cards and his writings may be additionally illustrative as well, though take care as many of his notes are in multiple languages.

      Another potentially useful example is this video interview with Kathleen Coleman from the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. It's in the realm of historical linguistics and lexicography, but she describes researchers collecting masses of data (from texts, inscriptions, coins, graffiti, etc.) on cards which they can then study and arrange to write their own articles about Latin words and their use across time/history. It's an incredibly simple looking example because they're creating a "dictionary", but the work involved was painstaking historical work to be sure.

      Again, when you're done, remember to go back and practice for yourself. Read. Ask questions of the texts and sources you're working with. Write them down. Allow your zettelkasten to become a ratchet for your ideas. New ideas and questions will emerge. Write them down! Follow up on them. Hunt down the answers. Make notes on others' attempts to answer similar questions. Then analyze, compare, and contrast them all to see what you might have to say on the topics. Rinse and repeat.

      As a further and final (meta) example, some of my answer to your questions has been based on my own experience, but the majority of it is easy to pull up, because I can pose your questions not to my experience, but to my own zettelkasten and then quickly search and pull up a variety of examples I've collected over time. Of course I have far more experience with my own zettelkasten, so it's easier and quicker for me to query it than for you, but you'll build this facility with your own over time.

      Good luck. 🗃️

    1. if you look at somewhere like the UK 75% of all our flights are made by just 15% of the population and we know who that 15% are you know they're not the average person or the poor person so we're not talking about 00:12:49 someone who flies occasionally away on holiday we're talking about people who fly really regularly they have their second homes they have their big mansions they have their large cars and this particular group all of those 00:13:02 things will have to change
      • for: elites - lifestyle change, great simplification, worldview transition -materially-excessive and wonder-poor to materially- sufficient and wonder-rich, awakening wonder, Deep Humanity, BEing journeys

      • comment

      • possible way to have more than one home
      • a group can co-create and mutually invest in a regenerative timeshare
        • an example is to co-invest in a regenerative local community economy based around a regerative agroforestry system which has community owned and supported agriculture with year round Regenerative work and sustainable accommodations
        • Deep Humanity BEing journeys can play a role to re-awaken wonder
  10. medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com
    1. ptomaine [to´mān, to-mān´] any of several toxic bases formed by decarboxylation of an amino acid, often by bacterial action, such as cadaverine, muscarine, and putrescine.ptomaine poisoning a term commonly misapplied to food poisoning. Contrary to popular belief, ptomaines are not injurious to the human digestive system, which is quite capable of reducing them to harmless substances.

      https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/tomaine

      I recall hearing ptomaine used in an Abbott and Costello bit with the connotation of foot poisoning. Charlie Chaplin also portrayed Adenoid Hynkel, Dictator of Tomania, in the picture The Great Dictator (1940).

      The implication of the country name Tomania outside of the "mania" meaning may be lost on audiences today.


      Lou Costello: Now look, Mr. Fields, don't get mad. Now, you can bring your kids to the party, and they can eat anything they want. They can have plenty of food. They can eat anything they want.<br /> Sid Fields: Sure, I can have my kids eat first, huh? Then if that broken-down, bad food you got doesn't give my kids ptomaine, then the other people will eat it, huh? You're gonna use my kids for guinea pigs. Say it! My kids are guinea pigs!<br /> Lou Costello: Mr. Fields, your kids are not guinea pigs.<br /> Sid Fields: Oh, they're just plain pigs?

      The Abbott and Costello Show, S1.E5 "The Birthday Party", Episode aired Jan 2, 1953, Running time: 00:27:00 <br /> (emphasis added)

    1. Studs Terkel, the oral historian, was known to admonish friends who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.

      love "raucous conversation"!

    1. Maybe this will help: [Great Books of the Western World SYNTOPICON changes in 1986 (more info in comments) : ClassicalEducation](https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/hlvnkv/great_books_of_the_western_world_syntopicon/)

      reply to u/Paddy48ob at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17jscyk/comment/k80z1nn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      Thanks for this pointer. As a note, when I compare my 1954 version against the photo of the 1990 edition (which has fewer pages), it's obvious that the "1. The ends of education" section in the 1954 edition is significantly more thorough with more references (and supplementary data) which don't exist in the 1990 edition. The 1990 edition presumably removes the references for the books which they may have removed from that edition (though it may have actually been even more--I didn't check this carefully).

      Just comparing the two pages that I can see, I don't see any references to the added texts of the 1990 edition appearing in that version of the Syntopicon at all.

      I took a quick look at the Syntopicon V1 (1990) via the Internet Archive and of the added texts that year I sampled searches for Voltaire, Erasmus, and John Calvin and the only appearances of them to be found are in the Addition Bibliography sections which is also where they appeared in the 1952 editions. My small sampling/search found no added references of any of these three to the primary portions of the main References sections, so they obviously didn't do the additional editorial work to find and insert those.

      As a result, it appears that the 1952 (and reprint editions following it) have a measurably better and more valuable version of the Syntopicon. The 1990 (2nd Edition) is a watered down and less useful version of the original. It is definitely not the dramatically improved version one might have hoped for given the intervening 38 years.

  11. Oct 2023
    1. Alter’s commentary benefits from his allusions to, among others, Freud, Gilgamesh, Herodotus, Hesiod, Homer, Josephus, Joyce, Kafka, Melville, Milton, Molière, Nabokov, Shakespeare, Shelley, and Sophocles. But technical words and phrases often appear without explanation: aleatory device, autochthonous, collocation, deictic, diachronic collage, dittography, durance vile, emphatic anaphora, gnomic, haplography, metonymy, and threnody. (To my knowledge, there is no readily available glossary containing all these words—so you will just have to google one word at a time, dear reader.) Even when Alter offers a definition as an aside, I wonder how many people will benefit from his explanations., e.g., “This pairing is virtually a zeugma, the syntactic yoking together of disparate items” (Isaiah 44:15).

      Is it really incumbent on the author to translate every word he's using with respect to the language in which he's writing. He's already doing us a service by translating the Hebrew. Are modern readers somehow with out a dictionary? I might believe they've not been classically educated to capture all the allusions, but the dictionary portion is a simple fix that is difficult to call him out on from a critical perspective, especially in a publication like "Law & Liberty" whose audience is specifically the liberally educated!?!

    1. This is great and yes it makes perfect sense, thank you!The comment on reading is super helpful. As I've mentioned on here before I've come ti PhD straight from industry, so learning these skills from scratch. Reading especially is still tricky for me after a year, and I tend to read too deeply, and try to read whole texts, and then over annotate.It's good to be reminded that this isn't how academic reading works.

      reply to Admirable_Discount75 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5nzic6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      If you've not come across it before you'll likely find Adler & Van Doren (1972) for reading a useful place to start, especially their idea of syntopical reading. Umberto Eco (2015) is also a good supplement to a lot of the internet-based and Ahrensian ZK material. After those try Mills.

      Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated ed. edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011. https://amzn.to/45IjBcV. (audiobook available; or a video synopsis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_rizr8bb0c)

      Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.

      Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062.

      Should it help, I often find that audiobook versions of books or coursework sources like The Great Courses (often free at local libraries, through Hoopla, or other sources), or the highest quality material from YouTube/podcasts listened to at 1.5 - 2x speed while you're walking/commuting can give you quick overviews and/or inspectional reads at a relatively low time cost. Short reminder notes/keywords (to search) while listening can then allow you to do fast searches of the actual texts and/or course guidebooks for excerpting and note making afterwards. Highly selective use of the audiobook bookmarking features let you relisten to short portions as necessary.

      As an example, one could do a quick crash course/overview of something like Marx and Communism over a week by quickly listening to all or parts of:

      These in combination with sources like Oxford's: Very Short Introduction series book on Marx (which usually have good bibliographies) would allow you to quickly expand into more specialized "handbooks" (Oxford, Cambridge, Routledge, Sage) on the subject of Marx and from there into even more technical literature and journal articles. Obviously the deeper you go, the slower things may become depending on the depth you're looking to go.

    1. Thank you. Steve, for raising the alarm on this catastrophe! One minor comment. It should be QC'ed, not QA'ed. Quality control is done first. Quality Assurance (QA) comes after QC. QA is basically checking the calculations and the test results in the batch records. I worked in QC and QA for big pharma for decades. I tried to warn people in early 2021 that there's no way the quality control testing could be done at warp speed. Nobody listened to me despite my decades of experience in big pharma!

      "warp speed" sounds fancy, plus "its an emergency, we have no time"...

      it really was just an intelligence test, a global-scale exploit of trust in authorities. (and lets be honest, stupid people deserve to die.)

      problem is, they (elites, military, industry) seem to go for actual forced vaccinations, which would be an escalation from psychological warfare to actual warfare against the 95% "useless eaters".

      personally, i would prefer if they would globally legalize serial murder and assault rifles, then "we the people" would solve the overpopulation. (because: serial murder is the only alternative to mass murder.) but they are scared that we would also kill the wrong people (their servants because they are evil or stupid). (anyone crying about depopulation should suggest better solutions. denying overpopulation is just another failed intelligence test.)

    1. https://udenver.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcuceuspzkuE9VomnEaGva1HH1ra_iS4Eua?ref=jessestommel.com#/registration

      Some related ideas that are suggesting some sort of thesis for improving the idea of ungrading: - We measure the things we care about. - In Education, we care about learning and understanding, but measuring these outside of testing and evaluation is difficult at best (therefor ungrading). - No one cares about your GPA six months after you graduate. - Somehow we've tied up evaluations and grades into the toxic capitalism and competition within US culture. Some of this is tied into educational movements related to Frederick Winslow Taylor and Harvards Eliot. - Hierarchies instituted by the Great Chain of Being have confounded our educational process.

    1. And with that puerile quarrel between stubborn warlords over the right to own and to rape a girl, Western literature begins.

      A stark statement that lays bare the original sin of Western thought.

  12. Sep 2023
    1. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance.

      —Kenneth Burke. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941.

      via Doug Brent at https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/2.1/features/brent/burke.htm

    1. syntopicalreading

      relationship of synoptical and syntopical

      Did the idea of syntopicality exist prior to Adler? Did it spring from the work of German religious scholars of XIX C who began doing synoptical readings and comparisons of the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke in the Bible?

      link to the "great conversation" quote of Whitehead about Plato: https://hypothes.is/a/qb2T7l9nEe6uVVOdez8mKw

    2. RECOMMENDED READING LIST

      Compare this list to what ultimately became the Great Books of the Western World in 1952. Lots more 20th century writing on it to begin...

    3. Although not all of the books listed are "great" in any of the commonly accepted meanings of the term, all of them will reward you for the effort you make to read them.

      This book was published originally in 1940 and apparently the Great Books of the Western World was hatched in 1943, so this book isn't necessarily a stepping stone to pitching/selling those, though obviously it informs the ideas which led up to its creation.

      Note that it is roughly contemporaneous to his article a year later:

      Adler, Mortimer J. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1941.<br /> https://stevenson.ucsc.edu/academics/stevenson-college-core-courses/how-to-mark-a-book-1.pdf

    1. Harl, Kenneth W. The Vikings: Course Guidebook. Vol. 3910. The Great Courses. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2005.

      Vikings. Streaming Video. Vol. 3910. The Great Courses. Chantilly, VA, 2005. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/vikings.

      annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:e17d7b3a22a4a56be07f2afb64548410<br /> search

      Started 2023-09-18

    1. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. 27th Printing. Vol. 1. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. 1952. Reprint, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1984.

      I read the first edition.

      Hutchins, Robert M. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. Edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. 1st ed. Vol. 1. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

      urn:x-pdf:0ce8391ed9f9f1cfc78c28b6c923abac<br /> Annotation search: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A0ce8391ed9f9f1cfc78c28b6c923abac

    1. Underlines and margin notes in an unknown hand are interspersed throughout the texts. Volume I includes a daily devotional page that has been used as a bookmark. The back endpapers of Volume IV has been copiously annotated.

      Jack Kerouac followed the general advice of Mortimer J. Adler to write notes into the endpapers of his books as evidenced by the endpapers of Volume IV of the 7th Year Course of The Great Books Foundation series with which Adler was closely associated.

    1. 'The Aeneid' Begins (Schedule and Context)

      reply to u/epiphanysherald at https://www.reddit.com/r/AYearOfMythology/comments/16eti72/the_aeneid_begins_schedule_and_context/

      I've not listened to it before, but some may find Elizabeth Vandiver's Aeneid of Virgil from The Great Courses series to have some useful information and background while reading: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/aeneid-of-virgil.

      It's not terribly expensive on their website, but many public libraries will have copies available for free, often including streaming through Overdrive.com, HooplaDigital.com, or other related free platforms.

      Others in their series including those I've gone through from Vandiver before (The Iliad of Homer comes to mind) have been useful/helpful, especially with regard to context and history.

    1. "Surrendering" by Ocean Vuong

      1. He moved into United State when he was age of five. He first came to United State when he started kindergarten. Seven of them live in the apartment one bedroom and bathroom to share the whole. He learned ABC song and alphabet. He knows the ABC that he forgot the letter is M comes before N.

      2. He went to the library since he was on the recess. He was in the library hiding from the bully. The bully just came in the library doing the slight frame and soft voice in front of the kid where he sit. He left the library, he walked to the middle of the schoolyard started calling him the pansy and fairy. He knows the American flag that he recognize on the microphone against the backdrop.

    1. Wills, Garry. “After 54 Great Books, 102 Great Ideas, Now—Count Them !—Three Revolutions.” The New York Times, June 13, 1971, sec. BR. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/13/archives/the-common-sense-of-politics-by-mortimer-j-adler-265-pp-new-york.html

      It's not super obvious from the digitized context (text), but this review is in relation to The Common Sense of Politics (1971) by Mortimer J. Adler.

      Wills criticizes Adler and his take in the book as well as the general enterprise of the Great Books of the Western World.

      There seem to be interesting sparks here in the turn of the Republican party in the early 70s moving into the coming Reagan era.

  13. Aug 2023
    1. Whereas ChatGPT may be a bullshitter, Claude can be a co-reader whose output specifically references and works to make “meaning” in response to another author’s words.

      "Reading with an artificial intelligence" seems like a fascinating way to participate in the Great Conversation.

    1. I could continue a thread anywhere, rather than always picking it up at the end. I could sketch out where I expected things to go, with an outline, rather than keeping all the points I wanted to hit in my head as I wrote. If I got stuck on something, I could write about how I was stuck nested underneath whatever paragraph I was currently writing, but then collapse the meta-thoughts to be invisible later -- so the overall narrative doesn’t feel interrupted.

      Notes about what you don't know (open questions), empty outline slots, red links as [[wikilinks]], and other "holes" in tools for thought provide a bookmark for where one may have quit exploring, but are an explicit breadcrumb for picking up that line of thought and continuing it at a future time.

      Linear writing in one's notebooks, books they're reading, and other places doesn't always provide an explicit space which invites the reader or writer to fill them in. One has to train themselves to annotate in the margins to have a conversation with the text. Until one sees these empty spaces as inviting spaces they can be invisible to the eye.

    1. Imagine the younger generation studying great books andlearning the liberal arts. Imagine an adult population con-tinuing to turn to the same sources of strength, inspiration,and communication. We could talk to one another then. Weshould be even better specialists than we are today because wecould understand the history of our specialty and its relationto all the others. We would be better citizens and better men.We might turn out to be the nucleus of the world community.

      Is the cohesive nature of Hutchins and Adler's enterprise for the humanities and the Great Conversation, part of the kernel of the rise of interdisciplinarity seen in the early 2000s onward in academia (and possibly industry).

      Certainly large portions are the result of uber-specialization, particularly in spaces which have concatenated and have allowed people to specialize in multiple areas to create new combinatorial creative possibilities.

    2. The mathematical specialist, for example, canget further faster into the great mathematicians than a readerwho is without his specialized training. With the help ofgreat books, specialized knowledge can radiate out into agenuine interfiltration of common learning and common life.

      Here Hutchins is again prefiguring C.P. Snow's "two cultures". He makes the argument that by having a shared base of knowledge and culture in our society's past history of knowledge (and especially early scientists and mathematicians), everyone, despite their individual interests and specializations, can be an active participant in a broader human conversation.

    3. The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.

      We need some common culture to bind humanity together. Hutchins makes the argument that the Great Conversation can help to effectuate this binding through shared culture and knowledge.

      Perhaps he is even more right in the 2000s than he was in the 1950s?

    4. I should like to add that specialization, instead of makingthe Great Conversation irrelevant, makes it more pertinentthan ever. Specialization makes it harder to carry on anykind of conversation; but this calls for greater effort, not theabandonment of the attempt.

      The dramatic increase in economic specialization of humanity driven by the Industrial Revolution has many benefits to societies, but it also has detrimental effects when the core knowledge and shared base of the society is lost.

      Certainly individuals have a greater reliance on specialists for future outcomes (think about the specialization of areas like climate science which can have destructive outcomes on all of humanity or public health outcomes with respect to vaccines and specialized health care delivery), but they also need to have a common base of knowledge/culture and the ability to think critically for themselves to be able to effect necessary changes, particularly when the pace of those changes is more rapid than humans have generally been evolved to accept them.

    5. Do science, technology, industrialization, and specializa-tion render the Great Conversation irrelevant?
    6. In general the professors of the humanities and the socialsciences and history, fascinated by the marvels of experi-mental natural science, were overpowered by the idea thatsimilar marvels could be produced in their own fields by theuse of the same methods. They also seemed convinced thatany results obtained in these fields by any other methods werenot worth achieving. This automatically ruled out writerspreviously thought great who had had the misfortune to livebefore the method of empirical natural science had reachedits present predominance and who had never thought ofapplying it to problems and subject matters outside the rangeof empirical natural science.

      Hutchins indicates that part of the fall of the humanities was the result of the rise of the scientific method and experimental science. In wanting fields from the humanities—like social sciences and history—to be a part of this new scientific paradigm, professors completely reframed their paradigms in a more scientific mode and thereby erased the progenitors and ideas in these fields for newer material which replaced the old which was now viewed as "less than" in the new paradigms. This same sort of erasure of Indigenous knowledges was also similarly effected as they were also seen as "less than" from the perspective of the new scientific regime.

      One might also suggest that some of it was the result of the acceleration of life brought on by the invention of writing, literacy, and the spread of the printing press making for larger swaths of knowledge to be more immediately available.

    7. This set of books is offered not merely as an object uponwhich leisure may be expended, but also as a means to thehumanization of work through understanding.16

      Purpose of the Great Books of the Western World

    1. The Great Gatsby  F. Scott Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Nippoldt (Illustrated by) FRONTLIST October 10, 2023 FRONTLIST | October 10, 2023 9781524879761, 1524879762 Hardcover $45.00 USD, $60.00 CAD Fiction / Classics

      https://www.edelweiss.plus/#sku=1524879762&page=1

      This looks like a fascinating illustrated edition from Andrews McMeel Publishing.

    1. Barzun, Jacques. “The Great Books.” The Atlantic, December 1952. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1952/12/the-great-books/642341/.

      Barzun heaps praise on Great Books of the Western World with some criticism of what it is also missing. He finds more than a few superlative words for the majesty of the Syntopicon.

    2. I he fact is that there arc some three thousand subheadings. So persons who feel that an official ceiling of 102 ideas would cramp their style can breathe freely.

      According to Jacques Barzun (and possibly written in the volumes itself), while the Syntopicon has 102 ideas, there are "some three thousand subheadings."

    3. It is not quite a five-foot shelf: 1 make it four feet eight-and-a-half — standard railroad gauge.

      the five-foot shelf reference is to the Harvard Classics competitor

    4. The late John Erskine, Professor of English in Columbia College, was in charge of an American study center at Dijon (where there is now a memorial library named after him) and there he drew up for the doughboys the first list of great books considered as a body of secular scripture. When he came back to his post at Columbia, he persuaded the faculty to establish a two-year course in which selected upperclassmen would read and dismiss these great books, one each week, withr a minimum of scholarly apparatus and a maximum of attention to the author’s words.

      Brief story of John Erskine's creation of "Great Books" study program.

    1. I like their simplicity and cloth texture, but family members seem to think that my 1952 set of The Great Books of the Western World are a bit on the "dreary looking side" compared with the more colorful books in our home library. (It says something that the 12 year old thinks my yellow Springer graduate math texts are more inviting...) Has anyone else had this problem and solved it with custom printed dust jackets?

      • Has anyone seen them for sale?
      • Made their own?
      • Interested in commissioning some as a bigger group?
      • Used a third-party company to design and print something?

      In doing something like this for fun, I might hope that the younger kids in the house might show more interest in some more lively/colorful custom covers.

      I'm partially tempted to use a classical painting as a display across the spines (a la Juniper Books collections) perhaps using:

      Other thoughts? suggestions?

      Syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/15gv2cz/custom_dust_jackets_for_the_great_books_of_the/

  14. Jul 2023
      • for: ecological civilization, degrowth, futures, deep ecology, emptiness, polycrisis, human exceptionalism, planned descent
      • source
      • Description

        • Nate hosts this discussion on what constitutes an ecological civilization with guests
          • William Rees
          • Rex Weyler
          • Nora Bateson
      • Reflections Overall,

        • an insightful discussion on the polycrisis and
        • reflections on what is in store for civilization.
      • There is consensus that
        • what we are experiencing has been decades in the making and
        • the solutions-oriented approach to solving problems has only treated the symptoms and indeed has made things worse.
      • There is a strong undercurrent of the emptiness in nature
      • Rex

        • emphasized the folly of human exceptionalism that has been socially normalized and which
        • continues to create the major separation that fuels the polycrisis.
        • Not recognizing that we are nature, not recognizing our animal nature
        • we look upon nature with an attitude of controlling nature, rather than flowing with her.
        • advocated Taoism as a more consistent way to frame nature rather than the reductionist, control methodology that separates us from nature.
      • Nora's perspective is the folly of abstraction that generates fixed preconceptions of aspects of nature that we then reify.

        • The fixed preconceptions are solidified but they are an oversimplified version of reality,
        • and that oversimplification leads to actualizing the cliche"a little knowledge is dangerous" into civilization
        • in other words, the continuous manufacture of progress traps.
      • William sees our impending crash as not only inevitable, but natural.

        • In this, he concurs with Rex's perspective.
        • Human beings are simply another species and like them,
          • we are susceptible to population explosions when negative feedbacks are removed,
          • which can lead to nature self-correcting with mass dieoff when resources are overconsumed.
    1. Books aren’t something one approves or disapproves of; they are to be understood, interpreted, learned from, shocked by, argued with and enjoyed. Moreover, the evolution of literature and the other arts, their constant renewal over the centuries, has always been fueled by what is now censoriously labeled “cultural appropriation” but which is more properly described as “influence,” “inspiration” or “homage.” Poets, painters, novelists and other artists all borrow, distort and transform. That’s their job; that’s what they do.
    2. I regret that the ideal of a home or family library has pretty much vanished along with door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen and sets of the “Great Books of the Western World.”
    1. Margin Shopping suggestions?

      I've browsed through dozens of publishers who reprint translations of popular classics to find ones that have good broad margins to more easily be able to annotate in them. I've often considered self-publishing nice hardcover copies of out of copyright versions so that I could make nice wide margins or even interleave the books so that every other page was blank for taking notes.

      Notes on some publishers I've been contemplating:

      • The Folio Society seems to have some of the widest margins, but at a steep cost and a more limited selection.
      • Heritage Press has some good margins, but they're out of business and can be more expensive
      • Library of America has some of the larger mass-market hard cover margins with excellent quality, though their offerings are American writers only.
      • Penguin Classics seem to have some of the best margin widths for inexpensive paperbacks and has one of the widest offerings.
      • Norton Critical editions usually have reasonable paperback margins with excellent additional editorial for reasonable prices.

      Does anyone who marks up their books have particular publishers they like best for their ample margins, preferably in hard cover at a reasonable prices?

      Other than reprinting things myself, what other options are there for physical books? (For digital books, I often rely on my Kindle or I use Hypothes.is which offers endless margins digitally.)

      syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/15clwfd/margin_shopping_suggestions/

    1. The Great Turning, David Korten referred to this crisis as ​“the great unraveling.
      • title
        • The Great Turning
      • Author
        • David Korten
      • Description
        • David Korten describes "the great unraveling" as a multi-dimensional ecological, social and economic crisis
    2. The third great separation was the industrial agricultural revolution.
      • Third great separation

        • industrial agricultural revolution

          • Farming was a community affair, by necessity.
          • Nearly everyone in the United States lived on a farm, had lived on a farm, or knew someone who lived on a farm.
          • There was still a sense of connectedness to the land, the earth, through food and farming.
          • But ​“times changed” in rural America.
          • The industrialization of agriculture removed the necessity for community-based farming.

          • Farmers eventually lost their sense of connectedness to

            • their land,
            • to each other and
            • to their communities.
          • Consumers no longer know
            • who produces their food,
            • where it was produced, or
            • how it was produced.
          • What happens to food between the earth and the eater has become largely a mystery.
          • Food for family gatherings and religious holidays are of economic importance to the food industry,
            • but have little social or spiritual significance beyond following cultural traditions.
          • The dependence of humanity on the Earth for food is no less than during the early times of hunting and gathering,
            • but the sense of connectedness between the eater and the Earth has been lost.
      • quote

        • Farming was a community affair, by necessity
        • What happens to food between the earth and the eater has become largely a mystery.
    3. The second great separation followed the industrial revolution.
      • Second great separation
        • Industrial Revolution
          • The early enclosure movement during the 1600s
          • Prior to the enclosures, land was held in common for public use, not owned by individuals.
          • The rise of capitalism also occurred during this time.
            • Adam Smith wrote his landmark book, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776.
            • Land was privatized so the most efficient use of land could be determined
              • by market competition rather than
              • community consensus.
            • Labor then also had to be ​“commodified,” or bought and sold,
              • so non-farmers could work for wages and buy food and the other necessities of life they had been getting from the land.
            • With reliance on working for wages, buying, and selling
              • the necessity for personal relationships were diminished.
            • With the diminished necessity for personal relationships,
              • the social cohesion within families, communities and society began to diminish as well.
          • The persistence of chronic poverty and malnutrition, even during times of tremendous economic growth and individual wealth, are direct consequences of a growing sense of disconnectedness from each other that was nourished by the industrial era of economic development.
    1. The Editors wish especially to mention their debt to thelate John Erskine, who over thirty years ago began the move-ment to reintroduce the study of great books into Americaneducation, and who labored long and arduously on thepreparation of this set.
    2. a conver-sation that has gone on for twenty-five centuries, all dogmasand points of view appear.

      Does it really?!? When the conversation omits so many perspectives and points of view for lack of diversity, it's also going to be missing quite a lot that one may not anticipate either. It's also likely to go down some blind alleys that may not be as beneficial too.

    3. the reader becomes to thisextent his own editor.
    4. Some writers have made an important contribution to theGreat Conversation, but in a way that makes it impossible toinclude it in a set like this. These are writers, of whom Leib-nitz, Voltaire, and Balzac are notable examples, whose con-tribution lies in the total volume of their work, rather thanin a few great works, and whose total volume is too largeto be included or whose single works do not come up to thestandard of the other books in this set.
    5. We attach importance to making whole works, as distin-guished from excerpts, available; and in all but three cases,Aquinas, Kepler, and Fourier, the 443 works of the 74 auth-ors in this set are printed complete.

      There are 443 works by 74 authors in the Great Books of the Western World. All of them are printed in their entirety except for Aquinas, Kepler and Fourier.

    6. In many cases, all or some of an author'sworks included in this set were unavailable.

      One of the primary goals of The Great Books, was to make some of the (especially ancient writers) more accessible to modern audiences with respect to ready availability of their works which were otherwise much more expensive.

      This certainly says something about both publishing and reading practices of the early 20th century.

    7. The reason, then, for the omission of authors and worksafter 1900 is simply that the Editors did not feel that they oranyone else could accurately judge the merits of contempo-rary writings.

      The idea of the Lindy effect is subtly hiding here. Presumably it also existed before.

      It's often seen in how historians can or can't easily evaluate the impact of recent historical figures without the appropriate amount of additional evaluation with respect to passing time.

    8. the Great Conversation coversmore than twenty-five centuries.

      Broadly the entirety of the documented existence of mankind...

    9. The final decision on the list wasmade by me.

      Robert Hutchins takes sole responsibility for the final decision on the selection for the books which appear in The Great Books of the Western World series.

      One wonders what sort of advice he may have sought out or received with respect to a much broader diversity of topics and writers with respect to his own time. I reminded a bit of the article The 102 Great Ideas (Life, 1948) which highlights a more progressive stance with respect to women and feminism in the examples used.

      See: LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. Https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.

    10. The set is almost self-selected, in the sense that one bookleads to another, amplifying, modifying, or contradicting it.

      amplifying, modifying, contradicting...

      what other means of argumentation/conversation could one enumerate here with respect to a greater conversation?

    11. THE GREAT CONVERSATION

      How specifically does the author define "The Great Conversation"?

      Note that it is consistently capitalized throughout the book to give it greater importance.

    12. They now have the chance to understandthemselves through understanding their tradition.

      It feels odd that people wouldn't understand their own traditions, but it obviously happens. Information overload can obviously heavily afflict societies toward forgetting their traditions and the formation of new traditions, particularly in non-oral traditions which focus more on written texts which can more easily be ignored (not read) and then later replaced with seemingly newer traditions.

      Take for example the resurgence of note taking ideas circa 2014-2020 which completely disregarded the prior histories, particularly in lieu of new technologies for doing them.

      As a means of focusing on Western Culture, the editors here have highlighted some of the most important thoughts for encapsulating and influencing their current and future cultures.

      How do oral traditions embrace the idea of the "Great Conversation"?

    13. democracyrequires liberal education for all.

      Two of the driving reasons behind the Great Books project were improvement of both education and democracy.

      The democracy portion was likely prompted by the second Red Scare from ~1947-1957 which had profound effects on America. Published in 1952, this series would have considered it closely and it's interesting they included Marx in the thinkers at the end of the series.

    14. We may havemade errors of selection.

      A great admission to make upfront in such a massive endeavor which one hopes to shape the future.

      What does this mean for ars excerpendi writ large? Particularly when it may apply to hundreds of thousands?

    15. Great books alone will not do the trick; for the peoplemust have the information on which to base a judgment aswell as the ability to make one.
    1. readers typically turn to translations not to hear about culinary ephemera but to read literature.

      Part of literature is the Great Conversation, which often turns on the ability for writers to be understood and appreciated, often in translation. Gary Saul Morson takes P&V to task for their Russian translations which often focus on the incredibly specific nuances of direct translation, but which simultaneously lose the beauty and sense of literature. He says, "[...] readers typically turn to translations not to hear about culinary ephemera but to read literature."

  15. Jun 2023
    1. I do think it’s helpful for members of the public to know some basic facts about the past. For me, it’s the same idea as the saying “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” Similarly, if you know nothing you can be convinced of anything.

      These are much pithier versions of what Robert Hutchins is getting at when he's talking about the importance of the Great Conversation with respect to Democracy.

    1. The men who crafted Great Books programs, most prominently John Erskine, Mortimer Adler, and Scott Buchanan, promoted the idea that the reading of classics was a task meant for all students, at all levels, even if the works were translated from their original language. At several colleges, the curricula of undergraduate programs came to be based upon the reading of these Great Books.
  16. May 2023
  17. Apr 2023
    1. Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume II, Man to World. 1st ed. Vol. 3. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

    1. Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume I, Angel to Love. 1st ed. Vol. 2. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

    1. Aby Warburg died of a heart attack52:41 on the 26th of October, 1929,52:45 at the age of 63.

      Aby Warburg, scion of a major banking family died on October 26, 1929, just two days before Black Monday on October 28, the stock market crash which marked the end of the "Roaring Twenties" and the beginning of the Great Depression.


      Could family influences or changes at that time have caused small, but underlying issues relating to the crash at that time? What was the reaction of the Warburg family on early Monday the 28th?

      Aby, as the oldest, would have inherited the bank, but by arrangement with his younger brother in their youth apparently gave it to his brother in exchange for books.

    1. Frank Capra
    2. TheSyntopicon invites the reader to make on the set whatever demands arisefrom his own problems and interests. It is constructed to enable the reader,nomatter what the stages of his reading in other ways, to find that part of theGreat Conversation in which any topic that interests him is being discussed.

      While the Syntopicon ultimately appears in book form, one must recall that it started life as a paper slip-based card index (Life v24, issue 4, 1948). This index can be queried in some of the ways one might have queried a library card catalog or more specifically the way in which Niklas Luhmann indicated that he queried his zettelkasten (Luhmann,1981). Unlike a library card catalog, The Syntopicon would not only provide a variety of entry places within the Western canon to begin their search for answers, but would provide specific page numbers and passages rather than references to entire books.

      The Syntopicon invites the reader to make on the set whatever demands arise from his own problems and interests. It is constructed to enable the reader, no matter what the stages of his reading in other ways, to find that part of the Great Conversation in which any topic that interests him is being discussed. (p. 85)

      While the search space for the Syntopicon wasn't as large as the corpus covered by larger search engines of the 21st century, the work that went into making it and the depth and focus of the sources make it a much more valuable search tool from a humanistic perspective. This work and value can also be seen in a personal zettelkasten. Some of the value appears in the form of having previously built a store of contextualized knowledge, particularly in cases where some ideas have been forgotten or not easily called to mind, which serves as a context ratchet upon which to continue exploring and building.

  18. books.google.com books.google.com
    1. Two page spread of Life Magazine article with the title "The 102 Great Ideas" featuring a photo of 26 people behind 102 card indexes with categorized topical labels from Angel to Will.

    2. LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.

      Provides an small example of "the great conversation" on the equality of men and women.

    3. Amidst a number of very gendered advertisements in issue 4 of volume 24 of LIFE magazine from 1948 is a short piece on the pending release of The Encyclopædia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World.

      The piece starts out talking about the 432 classical works written by 71 men and highlights the fact that "Woman, not a main idea, is included [with] in [the topical category] Family Man and Love." The piece goes on by way of example of the work to excerpt portions on Idea number 51: "Man". To show the flexibility of the included Syntopicon categorization they elaborate with 15 excerpted passages from authors from Plato to Freud on Idea 51, subdivision 6b: "Men and Women: their equality or inequality".

      It provides a fantastic mini-study on the emerging conversation on gender studies as seen in a mainstream magazine in 1948.


      Were there any follow up letters to the editor on this topic in subsequent issues? How was this broader piece received with respect to the idea of gender at the time?

    4. A staff of at least 26 created the underlying index that would lay at the heart of the Great Books of the Western World which was prepared in a rented old fraternity house on the University of Chicago campus. (p. 93)

    1. Oakeshott saw educationas part of the ‘conversation of mankind’, wherein teachers induct their studentsinto that conversation by teaching them how to participate in the dialogue—howto hear the ‘voices’ of previous generations while cultivating their own uniquevoices.

      How did Michael Oakeshott's philosophy overlap with the idea of the 'Great Conversation' or 20th century movement of Adler's Great Books of the Western World.

      How does it influence the idea of "having conversations with the text" in the annotation space?

  19. Mar 2023
    1. In 1886, during a lecture on the "pleasure of reading," the British scientist, politician, and man of letters John Lubbock spoke of his wish for "a list of a hundred good books"; in the absence of such, he offered his own selection.
    1. In a postwar world in which educational self-improvement seemed within everyone’s reach, the Great Books could be presented as an item of intellectual furniture, rather like their prototype, the Encyclopedia Britannica (which also backed the project).

      the phrase "intellectual furniture" is sort of painful here...

      • Title
        • Impacts of meeting minimum access on critical earth systems amidst the Great Inequality
      • Abstract
      • Paraphrase

        • The Sustainable Development Goals aim to improve access to resources and services, reduce environmental degradation, eradicate poverty and reduce inequality.
        • However, the magnitude of the environmental burden that would arise from meeting the needs of the poorest is under debate—especially when compared to much larger burdens from the rich.
        • The ‘Great Acceleration’ of human impacts was also accompanied by a ‘Great Inequality’ in using and damaging the environment.
        • To correct the great inequality, the authors define ‘just access’ to minimum energy, water, food and infrastructure.
        • The penality incurred for achieving just access in 2018, with existing inequalities, technologies and behaviours, would have produced 2–26% additional impacts on the Earth’s natural systems of climate, water, land and nutrients—thus further crossing planetary boundaries.
        • These hypothetical impacts, caused by about a third of humanity, equalled those caused by the wealthiest 1–4%.
        • Technological and behavioural changes thus far, while important, did not deliver just access within a stable Earth system.
        • Achieving these goals therefore calls for a radical redistribution of resources.
      • Comment

    1. This is the Deluxe edition of the Great Books of the Western World. There are three versions of the set. the least expensive was cloth-bound. That was the original version published in 1952. In the 1970's a tan edition was issued that was more expensive. The problem is that the binding tends to chip and crack unless it was kept in a dark, refrigerated closet. This set, which is half bound in black Fabricoid (imitation Morocco leather) and half in cloth was the most expensive of the three, costing upwards of $1800 in the mid-Eighties, and the most durable with gilt tops.

      1952, 1970s, 1980s editions and their differences.

  20. Feb 2023
    1. Vandiver, Elizabeth. Classical Mythology. Audible (streaming audio). Vol. 243. The Great Courses: Western Literature. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2013.


      Vandiver, Elizabeth. “Classical Mythology: Course Guidebook.” The Teaching Company, 2013. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/classical-mythology.

  21. Jan 2023
    1. https://press.princeton.edu/series/ancient-wisdom-for-modern-readers

      This appears like Princeton University Press is publishing sections of someone's commonplace books as stand alone issues per heading where each chapter has a one or more selections (in the original language with new translations).

      This almost feels like a version of The Great Books of the Western World watered down for a modern audience?

  22. Dec 2022
    1. I’m reminded of an old poem by Bertolt Brecht, which my Viennese grandmother, the daughter of a lifelong socialist and union man, taught me. It’s called “Questions From a Worker Who Reads”:

      Bertolt Brecht has a poem "Questions From a Worker Who Reads" which points out how necessary societies are to their great accomplishments which can't ever be solely attributed to kings and leaders as if there is only a "Great Man theory of history".

  23. Nov 2022
    1. Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one's past, predicts or augments psychological wellbeing (PWB).

      Could this, in part, be behind some of the bump for slogans like "Make America Great Again" by looking back to an imagined past?


      Kelley, Nicholas J., William E. Davis, Jianning Dang, Li Liu, Tim Wildschut, and Constantine Sedikides. “Nostalgia Confers Psychological Wellbeing by Increasing Authenticity.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 102 (September 1, 2022): 104379. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2022.104379.

  24. Oct 2022
    1. To meet our domestic emergencies in credit and banking arising from the reaction to acute crisis abroad the National Credit Association was set up by the banks with resources of $500,000,000 to support sound banks against the frightened withdrawals and hoarding. It is giving aid to reopen solvent banks which have been closed. Federal officials have brought about many beneficial unions of banks and have employed other means which have prevented many bank closings. As a result of these measures the hoarding withdrawals which had risen to over $250,000,000 per week after the British crisis have substantially ceased.

      Hoover provided support for the banks in crisis, trying to stabalize the withdraws and panic

    2. There has been the least possible Government entry into the economic field, and that only in temporary and emergency form.

      He's trying to limit the amount of federal control and only trying to promote the help of state and local government.

    3. These measures have served those purposes and will promote recovery.

      Hoover didn't really DO anything; FDR was the one who made sure everything was in order, all the groups and laws he made. Hoover on the other hand, didn't. He just provided for some public work projects and helped a little, but definitely not as much as FDR. He should've done more.

    4. But of highest importance was the necessity of cooperation on our part to relieve the people of Germany from imminent disasters and to maintain their important relations to progress and stability in the world.

      Why was Hoover so stuck on helping Germany? Yes, it is the right thing to do, and to support Germany as it struggles, but our country was facing an economic panic; why help others with resources we desperately need ourselves?

    5. As our difficulties during the past year have plainly originated in large degree from these sources,

      I find it odd how Hoover is blaming almost everything on other countries instead of taking accountability and doing something about it. He's using a victim perspective instead of fixing it.

    1. laudator temporis acti

      laudator temporis acti translates as "a praiser of times past"

      Calls to mind:

      Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod quaerit et inventis miser abstinet ac timet uti, vel quod res omnis timide gelideque ministrat, dilator, spe longus, iners avidusque futuri, difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti se puero, castigator censorque minorum. —Horace's Ars Poetica (line 173)

      Many ills encompass an old man, whether because he seeks gain, and then miserably holds aloof from his store and fears to use it, or because, in all that he does, he lacks fire and courage, is dilatory and slow to form hopes, is sluggish and greedy of a longer life, peevish, surly, given to praising the days he spent as a boy, and to reproving and condemning the young. (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough)

      In Horace's version he's talking about a old curmudgeon and the phrase often has a pejorative tinge. It generally is used to mean someone who defends earlier periods of history ("the good old days") usually prior to their own lives and which they haven't directly experienced, as better than the present.


      Compare this with the sentiment behind Donald J. Trump's "Make America Great Again". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again

      The end of the passage also has historical precedent and hints of "You kids get off my lawn!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_kids_get_off_my_lawn!

    1. Thus, syllablessuch as ab, ac, ad, ib, ic were practiced for the sake of masteryof the language. When a child could name all of a determinednumber of combinations, he was said to know his ABC's.

      When did phonics start as a practice historically? Presumably after Mortimer J. Adler's note here?

      The great vowel shift and the variety of admixtures of languages comprising English make it significantly harder to learn to read compared to other languages whose orthography and sound systems (example: Japanese hiragana) are far simpler and more straightforward.

    1. http://www.greyroom.org/issues/60/20/the-dialectic-of-the-university-his-masters-voice/

      “The Indexers pose with the file of Great Ideas. At sides stand editors [Mortimer] Adler (left) and [William] Gorman (right). Each file drawer contains index references to a Great Idea. In center are the works of the 71 authors which constitute the Great Books.” From “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog,” Life 24, no. 4 (26 January 1948). Photo: George Skadding.

  25. Sep 2022
    1. Jack London, the noted American writer who summed up all the collective teeth-gnashing going on by openly calling for a "great white hope" to step up and win back their race's pride. London wrote: "Jim Jeffries must now emerge from his Alfalfa farm and remove that golden smile from Jack Johnson's face. Jeff, it's up to you. The White Man must be rescued."
  26. Aug 2022
    1. https://occidental.substack.com/p/the-adlernet-guide-part-ii?sd=pf

      Description of a note taking method for reading the Great Books: part commonplace, part zettelkasten.

      I'm curious where she's ultimately placing the cards to know if the color coding means anything in the end other than simply differentiating the card "types" up front? (i.e. does it help to distinguish cards once potentially mixed up?)

    2. But the real goal of a Great Books reading program is to experience the minds of these authors (something the Schoolmen called connatural knowledge) and imprint whatever value we find there on our souls (i.e. will and intellect). This can only be done through a process of intentional re-reading.
    1. With few exceptions, most market democracies have recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. But the public has not recovered from the shock of watching supposed experts and politicians, the people who posed as the wise pilots of our prosperity, sound and act totally clueless while the economy burned. In the past, when the elites controlled the flow of information, the financial collapse might have been portrayed as a sort of natural disaster, a tragedy we should unify around our leadership to overcome. By 2008, that was already impossible. The networked public perceived the crisis (rightly, I think) as a failure of government and of the expert elites.

      Martin Gurri argues that had the financial crisis of 2008 happened in the 20th century, the elites, through their control of the flow of information, might have portrayed it as a natural disaster we should rally around our leadership to overcome. But with the advent of the internet, we got the "networked public", and the elites and government lost their monopoly on information.

    1. Louis Menand had an interesting article on great books courses recently: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates.

      If you look closely at those photos of Adler, you'll notice that one is in context and the other is the same image of him cut and pasted onto a set of books.

      Those who are into this broader topic may also appreciate Alex Beam's book "A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books". A while back I remember going though Lawrence Principe's Great Courses lecture series on the History of Science to 1700 which I suspect might help contextualize a tour through the great courses.

      I'm curious if you're adding any other books that Adler et al left off their list?

    1. https://github.com/sajjad2881/NewSyntopicon

      Someone's creating a new digitally linked version of the Syntopicon as text files for Obsidian (and potentially other platforms). Looks like it's partial at best and will need a lot of editing work to become whole.

      found by way of

      Has anyone made a hypermedia rendition of the Syntopicon, i.e. with transcluded windows or "parallel pages" into the indexed texts?<br><br>Many of Adler's Great Books are public domain, so it wouldn't require *so* titanic a copyright issue… pic.twitter.com/UmWiyn5aBC

      — Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) August 17, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. Alexander had learned from King Porus during his 326 B.C. Indian campaign that elephants have sensitive hearing and poor eyesight, which makes them averse to unexpected loud, discordant sounds.
  27. Jul 2022
    1. The ‘Great Acceleration’ graphs, originally published in 2004 to show socio-economic andEarth System trends from 1750 to 2000, have now been updated to 2010.

      Description of Great Acceleration graphs